So I’ve been thinking about asexual culture and asexual perspectives lately. There were a few recent comments on an old post at Asexuality Unabashed on the topic, and then last week’s journal club got drawn out on a tangent about whether asexual people see the world differently than allosexual people, on the whole.

I often see people complaining that asexual culture boils down to cake, Sherlock and Doctor Who, and that it’s just an annoying collection of in-jokes. The thing is, I don’t actually think that’s true. I’m one of those people whose thinking about sexuality is very much a product of the time I’ve spent in ace circles, and I am always noticing that I think very differently about things than many of my peers. For that reason alone, I think there’s more to ace culture than the references that people often seem to think of.

So here’s one thing I think is central to asexual culture: a reductionist view of sexuality. 

Hey, I wrote a thing for the Asexual Agenda! If you’re interested in reading more, you should check out the link. 

Perhaps inspired by the Vice article, there has been some renewed interest in the question “Are asexuals queer?”  My answer to this question has slowly developed over time, from “Yes, obviously!” to “Let’s think a moment what that question even means.”

Some people think it means, “Do asexuals fit under the definition of queer?”  On one side you have people saying, “Queer means any non-normative gender or sexual orientation, so asexuals are queer.”  On the other side, you have people saying, “Queer just means LGBT, and I don’t see any asexuality in the L, G, B, or T.”  Both of these arguments are missing the point

Siggy has posted something for the Asexual Agenda! You should go check it out. 

If you’ve read any of my previous work, a lot of it is about trying to come up with operational definitions for things like sexual attraction, romantic relationships, and so forth. I’m most comfortable thinking about things by defining my premises, building a model, and following that to its logical conclusion. That’s very useful in my research, but I do it constantly—anyone who has socialized with me for long has watched me ruin a lot of perfectly good jokes that way.

I spent a lot of time trying to clarify my understanding by interrogating those premises. For the most part, that wasn’t a productive avenue of thought. I spent a lot of time arguing in circles and trying to collect data that didn’t ever coalesce into a functioning theory. I tried so hard to make the model I was working with internally consistent that I burned myself out on the entire discussion.

Instead, I’ve learned to be comfortable with ambiguity.

I have written a thing for the Asexual Agenda! Go check it out. 

I have a lot of gay friends who are friends through my boyfriend.  Recently some of them heard that I was asexual, and they started quizzing my boyfriend when I wasn’t around.  This is pretty nasty for reasons I’ll get into later.  But what’s odd is that I’ve known them for years and been out the entire time, and they only realize now?

Siggy has posted something new over at the Asexual Agenda. Come check it out! 

I think there are many ideas in LGBT politics that asexuals can learn from, and one of them is the concept of liberationism vs assimilationism.  They describe different attitudes or different political strategies.  Assimilationism emphasizes that gays and lesbians are thesameas straight folks: they just want to live in long-term, monogamous, committed, loving relationships.  Liberationism instead emphasizes that queer^* people have the right to bedifferent.  Why invest so much resources into same-sex marriage, when marriage is just another tool used to privilege heterosexual monogamous couples?

These two attitudes are not necessarily in conflict, since you can simultaneously talk about the similarities and differences of queer folk to straight folk.  But when you have major activist organizations allocating limited resources, different people are bound to disagree on the relative importance of the two strategies.

There’s a new post up at the Asexual Agenda by Siggy! Come check it out. 

In honor of National Coming Out Day (October 11th), I will share one of my many coming out stories, this being a light-hearted one.

When I want to be out to everyone, there are always stragglers who I just haven’t come out to yet.  Among those stragglers are the entirety of my extended family on my mother’s side (the Chinese side).  It just never comes up, because they don’t talk about that sort of thing.  Or so I thought.

For one thing, I believe the ace community needs to develop more offline resources. There needs to be more offline networking among aces, and more building of easily-identifiable spaces to do that networking in.

I wrote a thing for the Asexual Agenda! Go check it out.